Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife

Now that we’ve seen what the X800 Pro has been through in its lifespan, what about the 9700 Pro? One of the biggest requests for inclusion in this series is a direct comparison between the two cards, which we have set up here. Along with the request to use newer games on the 9700 Pro, we have gone ahead and run the 9700 Pro through the same paces on some of the more promising games that we’ve run the X800 Pro through, and recorded the results as a performance factor for each card over its performance on the previous driver revision. For the sake of time and minimizing any impact that a CPU-limited scenario would have, all tests were run with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. We have also included a performance summary, showing the performance factor between the first 4.05 drivers, and the latest 6.01 drivers on these games.